Press Release

Apptio’s New Budgeting and Forecasting Module Helps Enterprises Manage the Cost and Performance of IT Services

New Budgeting and Forecasting Module Enables IT and Finance Leaders to Optimize IT Investments in IT Services

Bellevue, Wash. – December 15, 2009 – Apptio, the leading provider of on-demand IT Financial Management software, today announced a new set of capabilities to help CIOs and their staff better manage the cost and performance of IT. Apptio’s SaaS-based suite now includes a Budgeting and Forecasting module which enables IT and finance to perform service-based budgeting, forecasting and variance measurement. With Apptio, the budgeting process can seamlessly work in both an IT Services and classic general ledger cost center framework, enabling better alignment of IT investment with business process priorities. Budgeting with Apptio improves IT’s control over the accuracy and completeness of the budgeting process, and greatly simplifies and streamlines the process. The integration of the budgeting process with the service costing system of record creates a closed-loop process of measuring budget ROI, and accelerates the creation of a culture of cost and performance accountability at all levels within IT.

Over the last few decades, IT has been focused on delivering technology for productivity gains, with inadequate capabilities to measure the ROI or business impact of those projects. Today, CIOs are being required to prove the business value of IT Services and their impact to business strategic initiatives. Cloud, Shadow IT and other outsource alternatives create price and service delivery pressures on internal IT, while virtualization technology makes it harder to track the true cost of IT Services. To address these challenges, IT and Finance executives need solutions that provide visibility into the cost, utilization and performance and budget variance of IT Services so they can reduce the cost of IT operations, measure the performance of IT and increase business value.

According to an independent report, “CIOs who don’t position IT to support the way business selects and uses technology are fighting against the currents of change,” wrote Bobby Cameron, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “As data shows, priorities and initiatives can be vastly different when the business is calling the shots. As software decisions move over to a business-driven responsibility, IT organizations will have to learn to cope with these shifts and, in a sense, educate business technology decision-makers with information, advice, and regular reviews to help them make successful software investment decisions.”

(“Priorities Shift As Business’ Grip On Technology Tightens”, Forrester Research, Inc., July 2009).

Extending Service Orientation into Budgeting, Forecasting and Variance

Apptio’s comprehensive ITFM suite allows organizations to move beyond cost transparency to address a broad set of functions across IT Executives, Operations and Finance organizations. In addition to the Service Costing, Bill of IT, Service Quality & Utilization, and IT Benchmarking modules, Apptio now automates the critical process of Budgeting and Forecasting. This module provides customers with:

  • IT-specific budgeting and forecasting processes that work from an IT Services perspective
  • Top-down and bottom-up budget allocation to enable both high-level IT strategies and granular line-item entry to shape budgets
  • A centralized budget model that consolidates IT Tower and GL budgets into an IT Service budget model
  • An intuitive, spreadsheet-like interface
  • Collaborative workflow and task management capabilities to facilitate accountability of multiple owners and inputs
  • Real-time reporting to track actual IT spend versus budgets and variance
  • Integration with service costing to provide in-line, granular allocation to IT services
  • Integration to a Bill of IT to report budget against key IT services and future investment

An IT Service view of the budget enables IT executives to look forward to see how future IT spend lines up against business service and priorities at all levels. This enables immediate scrutiny of variances against key IT services, and ensures that forward-looking budgetary investments are aligned to line of business priorities.

The combination of the budget and IT operational costs aligned to IT Services enables closed-loop measurement of the ROI of investments against the TCO of IT Services. For instance, for the first time, IT executives can see the budgetary outlay for blade servers and track the TCO of virtualization and server consolidation in a single system of record.

Bubbling up the budget into a Bill of IT Services and making that available to the Lines of Business as part of the budgeting process allows the business to influence the budgeting decisions in accordance to the priority of their business objectives. This combination helps IT executives partner with Finance and their line of business consumers to optimize the investments in IT.

“Since day one, our focus has been on arming CIOs and IT Finance leaders with better systems and processes to manage the business of IT, and to make that process as agile and intuitive as possible,” said Sunny Gupta, CEO of Apptio. “Since IT leaders are taking on more of a service provider role in the enterprise, we have evolved our product to offer a comprehensive suite of functionality to manage the cost and performance of IT. This new collection of modules builds on our power platform of data management, data analytics and reporting to streamline the processes that leading IT organizations are implementing.”

About Apptio

Apptio is the leading independent provider of on-demand Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions for managing the business of IT. Apptio enables IT leaders to manage the cost, quality and value of IT Services by providing deep visibility into the total cost of IT services, communicating the value of IT to the business through an interactive Bill of IT™, and strategically aligning the planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. Apptio’s TBM solutions play a critical role in helping companies understand and drive chargebackvirtualizationcloud and other key technology initiatives. Global enterprise customers such as Bank of America, Boeing, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, St. Luke’s Health System, and Swiss Re rely on Apptio® products and services to reduce costs and align IT with business priorities. For more information, visit the Apptio website or the Apptio blog.

Contact:

Karli Overmier
Barokas PR for Apptio
apptio@barokas.com
206-264-8220